Krebs on Security

In-depth security news and investigation

Posts Tagged: .ego.gov.tr

Google and Microsoft today began warning users about active phishing attacks against Google’s online properties. The two companies said the attacks resulted from a fraudulent digital certificate that was mistakenly issued by a Turkish domain registrar.

In a blog post published today, Google said that on Dec. 24, 2012, its Chrome Web browser detected and blocked an unauthorized digital certificate for the “*.google.com” domain.

“We investigated immediately and found the certificate was issued by an intermediate certificate authority (CA) linking back to TURKTRUST, a Turkish certificate authority,” wrote Adam Langley, a Google software engineer. “Intermediate CA certificates carry the full authority of the CA, so anyone who has one can use it to create a certificate for any website they wish to impersonate.”

Langley said that Google responded by Chrome on December 25 to block that intermediate CA, and then alerted TURKTRUST and other browser vendors. “TURKTRUST told us that based on our information, they discovered that in August 2011 they had mistakenly issued two intermediate CA certificates to organizations that should have instead received regular SSL certificates. On December 26, we pushed another Chrome metadata update to block the second mistaken CA certificate and informed the other browser vendors.”

Separately, Microsoft has issued an advisory with a bit more detail, saying it is aware of active attacks using one of the fraudulent digital certificates issued by TURKTRUST Inc.